The Coachella Valley Music And Arts Festival, now in its 18th iteration, is a commitment — blowing a small fortune on tickets, parking and novelty food, bathing in dry heat and residual sweat in wait of Top 40 royalty, catching a glimpse of the Wal-Mart yodelin' kid. It's a whole thing.
Selling out tickets months in advance and drawing hundreds of thousands of attendees — last year's event brought 250,000 folks in tow — Coachella is an unavoidable entity. And yet, it's a vital roll call of popular music at its eclectic, grandiose best.
Coachella's live streams have become something of their own appointment viewing experience. I, for one, remember yelling along to Kanye West's 2011 set the first year Coachella loaded up its official live streams on YouTube. They're even rolling out some of its streamed performances in sweet, sweet VR this year, inching us closer and closer to the anodyne, goggle-optic future that WALL-E predicted.
Copyright 2018 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.